


take me to church

by callunavulgari



Series: Heather's Favorites [36]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: FBI Intern Stiles, First Kiss, M/M, On the Run, Reunions, Season/Series 06B
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-15 13:29:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11806941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: Derek scoffs. “You want to take me back toQuantico.”“I’m an intern, Derek. Pretty sure they’re not going to go looking for you under my mattress. Come on,” he coaxes, jostling Derek with his elbow. “You know how this works, we’ve done it before. Safest place to be is right under their nose.”“This is a little bigger than hiding in the closet every once in awhile so your father doesn’t notice that you're harboring a fugitive, Stiles,” Derek tells him. He shuffles backwards, but Stiles follows him, always a little too close. When Stiles refuses to look chastised Derek reaches out and grabs hold of his wrist, stopping him at arm’s length. He swallows. “We aren’t talking about you getting kicked out of your program if they find me. You’ll go to prison.”





	take me to church

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kaikamahine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/gifts).



> Do you ever just... pick up an old shirt that you haven't worn in ages and when you try it on you realize that not only does it still fit, but that it's actually _more_ comfortable than you remember? ...Yeah. Yeah. 
> 
> Don't ask me why this takes place in a church. I was brainstorming on the drive to work earlier and the line 'empty churches and soulless curses' got stuck in my head. Also, I know Elizabeth likes them. For the flower prompt on tumblr, she gave me impatience, with a Derek Hale pairing of my choosing. I got really close to writing about Derek and Laura in a church, I really did. But I couldn't resist.

“Didn’t know you were religious,” a voice calls loudly. The sound of it jumps around the room, bouncing off of the polished floors and elaborately decorated walls in a haunting echo. The voice is the same as it was when Derek last heard it. He breathes in deep through his nose, shudders when the scent hits him, and closes his eyes.

He isn’t religious. Not exactly. His grandparent’s on his mother’s side had been Lakota and believed half-heartedly in Wakan Tanka, his grandparent’s on his father’s side heavily Catholic in the way that only native Europeans could be. Because of this, his parents had been neither.

In New York, Derek had spent a lot of time in churches, chasing the idea of forgiveness. He’d liked how quiet they were, that reassuring hush that featured most heavily in libraries. He would close his eyes in the dark there and listen, the murmur of the city almost drowned out by the silence. Sometimes, in those early summers when he still looked too young to work, he would sit through mass just so he would be able to take it all in - the clicking of heels on marble, the gentle susurration of the congregation flicking through their bibles, the peculiar beauty of the hymns.

Even then, Derek didn’t believe in a god. He’d come home smelling of frankincense and myrrh, the mildewy smell of old bibles clinging to his fingertips. Laura would look at him then, blankly, as if she didn’t know him. It would be easy, he’d thought, to step into a confessional and be absolved of his sins. He’d thought that maybe it would lift some of the weight, lighten the immense cloud of grief wrapped around his throat like a noose.

There are footsteps coming down the center aisle, the sound of each foot coming down on gleaming marble more of a steady clack than a thump. Less than a heel, more than a sneaker. They come to a stop next to him, and to Derek’s surprise, a body slides into the pew next to him, so close that Derek can feel the heat of their thigh pressed to his.

“How did you find me?” he asks softly, tilting his head back. _Exposing his throat_ , a part of him insists. Derek doesn’t open his eyes.

Stiles makes a scoffing sound and Derek can feel from the displacement of air against his face that means he’s made some sort of loud, sweeping gesture. The corners of Derek's lips tick upwards. He’d missed that.

“How _didn’t_ I find you,” Stiles says, which isn’t really an answer. He goes quiet at Derek's side, so still that Derek quietly entertains the idea that this might be a trap. Where is the boy that never _stopped_ moving? Tapping, shifting, sighing. Stiles was so rarely still that an act as simple as _sitting quietly in a church_ is enough to raise his suspicions. He takes another quick, shallow breath in through his nose, but the scent remains unaltered. Stress, hormones, and boy. _Stiles._

“So,” Stiles interjects into the silence, “did you know that you’re wanted by the FBI?”

Derek listens to the sound of a field mouse chewing a hole through the side of the altar so he doesn’t have to pay attention to Stiles’s heart, thumping steadily away, so close.

He did know. Still, he asks, “Am I?”

Stiles doesn’t quite rise to the bait, shifting his weight to one side and crossing his legs. His knee presses hard into Derek’s thigh. 

“You are! Wanna know how I found out?” he asks cheerfully, his leg beginning to twitch up and down. _That's_ more like it. “My instructor basically pulled up a video of your half-naked ass sprinting through the damn woods during class.” He leans in close, his breath tickling the sides of Derek’s throat and says, in a low voice that makes Derek think of the confessional ten feet to their right, “I spat water all over the girl in front of me.”

Derek snorts, his mouth going wide around a grin. There’s a warm, familiar feeling growing in the center of his chest, a seed that’s started to sprout at the first sign of the sun. He opens his eyes and looks.

Stiles doesn’t look much different than he did when Derek left. His hair is a little bit longer, face a little sharper, and there's a new scar on his chin, but Stiles had already been showing signs of the man he would become when Derek had left, springing up in height so suddenly, his face going long and narrow, skin stretched too tightly over his bones. He looks tired, Derek thinks, and is overcome with the sudden, inexplicable urge to touch those thin, razorblade sharp wrists.

He fights it back, looking instead at the narrow black tie and how the crisp white button-up pulls taut against Stiles's admittedly impressive shoulders. He’s wearing dress shoes - less than a heel, more than a sneaker.

Derek licks his lips and watches as Stiles tilts his head to follow the motion with his eyes.

“What am I wanted for?” he asks quietly, so Stiles will stop staring at his mouth. Stiles’s eyes dart back to his, but there’s no shame there anymore, no fear of being caught staring, just a rueful kind of appreciation. He smiles a little, and tilts his head closer.

Derek watches his lips form the word, can feel Stiles’s breath on his mouth when he whispers nonchalantly, his voice like a shrug, “Mass murder.”

“You’d think that they’d come up with something new for a change,” he jokes, going for flippant but missing by a long shot. His voice just sounds old. Tired. Derek's tired of running.

Stiles doesn’t say anything about it, but Derek can see the tone register with him. He’s good about not missing things, but he’s also always been good at guarding Derek’s secrets. Stiles keeps watching him, his heavy gaze knowing. He feels exposed, flayed open, every piece of him meticulously labelled and put on display.

Stiles is _very good_ at not missing things, and he's always been able to read Derek.

At last, his mouth quirks and he turns away, slapping a friendly hand down onto Derek’s knee. A lifetime ago, Derek would have shifted away. Growled. Protested. Now, Derek’s too busy trying to remember the last time someone touched him.

“Come on,” Stiles says, pushing to his feet. He turns once he’s up and grabs Derek’s hand, yanking him upright before Derek can think to protest. “I’ve got a place.”

Derek looks at him, his nose wrinkling dubiously. “You have a place in Murfreesboro?”

Stiles raises an eyebrow back, refusing to give ground. “I have a place in Virginia. It’s like, a three hour drive, tops. Less if I speed.”

Derek scoffs. “You want to take me back to _Quantico_.”

“I’m an _intern_ , Derek. Pretty sure they’re not going to go looking for you under my mattress. Come on,” he coaxes, jostling Derek with his elbow. “You know how this works, we’ve done it before. Safest place to be is right under their nose.”

“This is a little bigger than hiding in the closet every once in awhile so your father doesn’t notice that you're harboring a fugitive, Stiles,” Derek tells him. He shuffles backwards, but Stiles follows him, always a little too close. When Stiles refuses to look chastised Derek reaches out and grabs hold of his wrist, stopping him at arm’s length. He swallows. “We aren’t talking about you getting kicked out of your program if they find me. You’ll go to _prison_.”

Stiles watches him, his eyes dark. Knowing. He takes a pointed step forward, always _pushing_ , and turns his wrist in Derek’s grip. He’s still watching as he threads their fingers together carefully, his palm a dry rasp against Derek’s.

“I know,” he whispers, and leans in to press their mouths together.

Derek’s entire body feels like stone. Stiles’s lips are dry, the pressure almost negligible. For once, he isn’t pushing.

Derek doesn’t remember the last time that he’d allowed himself to want this. It’s been years, at least, since before he even left Beacon Hills, holding the memory of Stiles and only looking at it from afar. Because if he’d looked-

Derek is weak. He’s always been weak for this boy. That hasn’t changed with time or distance. So he yields, his lips going soft and pliant, his shoulders slumping. He _gives_ , leaning in and catching Stiles’s jaw in one hand, using that grasp to draw Stiles closer. Derek parts his lips, lets them catch and slide against Stiles’s, making it long and slow and _wet_.

When he pulls back, Stiles’s eyes are glazed, and he sways after Derek when he goes to put some space between them - lips red and swollen. He licks them twice, blinking with helpless confusion, and Derek chuckles, leaning in to kiss him again. He makes this one quick.

“You said you had a place?” he asks, watching Stiles put himself back together.

“Yeah?” Stiles says, and then, more sure, “Yeah. Definitely.”

 

It’s raining when they leave the church, a warm downpour that leaves everything smelling of green things and wet earth. The sun is still shining, giving the parking lot a strange, otherworldly air. Stiles squints out into the glare, mashing the button on his key fob until an anonymous black sedan honks back at them, the tail lights flashing red.

Stiles bounds across the parking lot, holding a hand over his head to ward off the rain. A hint of ankle winks back at Derek as he scrambles gracelessly into the driver’s seat. Derek follows at a more sedate pace, swinging by the car that he’d bought for a couple hundred bucks from a local hick’s junkyard. He grabs his bag from the back and the picture of Laura that he’s got pinned under the visor, but leaves the rest to rot in the parking lot. Someone will find it eventually.

When he climbs into the passenger seat he’s uncomfortably damp, but can’t bring himself to be troubled over it. He feels lighter than he has in months. Maybe years.

“What happened to the jeep?” Derek asks, dragging a careless hand across the unfamiliar dashboard. The jeep had reeked of Stiles, of junk food and sweat and a little like the cheap cherry-scented pine tree he had looped over the rear-view mirror. This car still smells new, fake leather and plastic, with the faintest undercurrent of boy.

“Left it with Scott,” Stiles says easily, sliding the key home and turning the ignition. It doesn’t even fight him for it. “It wouldn’t have made the trip.”

That was true enough. Derek watches the parking lot disappear from view, relaxing into his seat more and more as the minutes pass. Derek is tired. It's been days since he's felt safe enough to catch more than a few hours of sleep in his shitty car, head propped uncomfortably against the window. Here, with Stiles next to him, Derek’s body is finally beginning to cave in to the need for sleep.

He makes himself stay awake for awhile, long enough for Stiles to flick the radio over to some generic top 40’s station. He keeps it quiet, occasionally mouthing along to the words, but never once getting loud enough to be offensive.

The third time that Derek jerks himself out of a light doze, Stiles turns to him incredulously and says, “For god’s sake, just go to sleep. I knew what I was signing up for when I saw those bags under your eyes.”

Derek blinks back at him sleepily, then back out at the highway. The sun is beginning its long, slow descent towards the horizon, pink and purple swatches of color streaking outwards across the sky. It hasn’t quite stopped raining, and the swish-swish of the windshield wipers is making it even harder to resist sleep. He doesn’t say what he’s thinking, which is that he’s still not a hundred percent sure that this isn’t a dream. He doesn’t want to miss a second of this, of Stiles’s hands on the steering wheel, the warmth of another body so close to Derek's, because he’s afraid that the moment he closes his eyes, he’ll be right back in that church. Alone.

He doesn’t say anything about what he wants to do to Stiles when they stop the car either, how his entire body is torn between twitchy impatience and syrupy sweet contentment.

“Okay,” he says eventually, and shuts his eyes.

When he wakes, it’s fully dark, the car is still, and Stiles is shaking him, his body warm and almost unbearably close.

“Hey,” Stiles says softly when Derek squints his eyes open. His face is mostly in shadow, but there’s a flicker of moonlight illuminating the curve of a smile. His hands are on Derek’s shoulders, fingers tucked up against the back of his neck. “This is it.”

Derek cranes his neck to look past him, at the nondescript apartment building that lies beyond. It’s old and brick, with peeling white shutters that frame each window. The steps leading up to the front door are cracked and crumbling on one side, and the flower boxes which he supposes are meant to add character to the place are overflowing with dead plants. There's a security camera posted over the door that worries him for a moment until he realizes that several wires have been ripped out at its base. When Stiles sees Derek looking, he laughs and says, “I didn’t even do that, man. It was like that when I moved in. But let's not test our luck.”

There are several large cobwebs woven across the window that sits just above the front door, and Derek watches the spiders spin their webs while Stiles unlocks the door for them. The hallway beyond smells of mold and dirty socks, the stairs creaking dangerously when he puts his weight on them, but Derek has lived in worse places.

“Here we go,” Stiles tells him when he gets them inside. He makes a wide, sweeping gesture, spinning in a little half circle to indicate the entirety of the living room. Belatedly, he flicks on a lamp, which casts everything in a soft, buttery glow. “Home sweet home.”

It’s pretty plain, a modest-sized television propped up on several cinderblocks that have seen better days, a couch that looks and smells like Stiles had pulled it out of the garbage somewhere, and several bombed out piles of library books spilled in sporadic places around the room. It smells less offensive inside of the apartment, where the smell of Stiles has overwhelmed the mildew and wood rot.

The kitchen, when Derek sees it, is void of everything but a single chipped mug and a microwave. The clock blinks back at him, zeroed out. Either Stiles had lost power and hadn’t bothered to reset the time, or he’d never set it in the first place.

Derek swallows hard when Stiles shuts the door behind him, shaking loose the caged feeling that threatens to well to the surface. He blinks, dropping his bag beside the door. There he hesitates, and sees Stiles hesitating too, as if he hadn’t quite planned this far. Derek can almost see the thoughts flicking through his head - be a gracious host, offer a drink, offer food, television, bed?

Derek watches Stiles’s face flicker through the first few stages of panic, and rests his back against the wall. He is tired. The impatience that had haunted him for that first half hour he spent in Stiles’s presence has ebbed, leaving him loose-limbed and lazy.

He wants to kiss Stiles though, so he does, stepping in close and tucking his fingers around the curve of a sharp hip. It’s an easy thing, tilting Stiles’s jaw with his fingers until he has access and then nudging their mouths together.

“Oh,” Stiles says, and melts into him.

They kiss lazily in the doorway, touching hesitant fingers to skin, mapping a path for later. It’s slow and meandering, nothing like he’d thought it might be.

“Hey, so, not to sound unappreciative here,” Stiles murmurs after awhile, “But uh.”

“Bed?” Derek whispers, pressing a careful kiss below Stiles’s ear. He watches it flush red, and decides that he likes it, so he does it again.

“Yeah, but-”

“Not like that?” Stiles glares at him, and Derek has to press his smile into Stiles’s skin to hide it. “It’s okay, Stiles. You drove six hours today, we can sleep.”

Stiles gives him a judgey look, but eventually relents, slumping back against the wall and scrubbing a hand through his hair. His lips are red and distracting, but he does look tired. Despite the boost of energy that his nap had awarded him, Derek can feel the bone-deep exhaustion creeping in again too.

“I missed you,” Stiles says, quiet and firm.

A little thrill goes through Derek, and he smiles, pulls Stiles in for another kiss.

“I take it that means you missed me too?” Stiles whispers between kisses, taking hold of Derek’s hips and guiding him backwards through a dark doorway. When the backs of Derek’s knees hit the edge of a bed he sinks down onto it gratefully, wrapping his arms around Stiles and bringing him down with him. Derek kisses him again, a little harder, testing, and smiles at how Stiles’s eyelashes flutter, his back arching off the bed.

“I always miss you,” he mutters, distracted. It’s getting harder and harder to pull away from the warmth of Stiles’s arms. Derek’s body is pliant, loose, and he badly wants sleep, but Stiles is all sharp-edged bones and hard angles mixed with slow, sweet kisses.

“This is going to probably suck,” Stiles admits when their lips are tingling pleasantly and they’re too tired to keep it up anymore.

Derek looks at him. “The sex or…?”

Stiles swats him.

“The sex,” he says loudly, “is going to be spectacular. Getting your name cleared- _again_ , I might add- that’s going to be the hard part.”

Derek shrugs. At this point, he’ll be happy as long as he doesn’t get them both thrown in prison. He still hasn’t told Stiles what lead up to all this, but then again, Stiles probably worked most of it out on his own before he’d even set out to find Derek.

“Maybe,” is all he says. He thinks about it, and then adds, “We should buy yogurt tomorrow.”

Stiles shifts onto his side to look at him, his face doing something complicated and disbelieving. “ _Yogurt_?”

“Sex and yogurt,” Derek muses. And then, “What? I haven’t had a refrigerator in over a year.”

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow is going to be a good day.


End file.
